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Photo#735280
    - Petrophila fulicalis

- Petrophila fulicalis
Bartlesville, Washington County, Oklahoma, USA
May 6, 2012
Supported by DNA barcoding, BOLD LPOKE615-12
This specimen is shown here: BOLD:AAG9560
Found at UV light near pond in wooded area of a flood plain.

Moved

Moved
Moved from Feather-edged Petrophila. After reviewing original literature and hundreds more images, a few things are fairly clear:
1. "fulicalis-like" Petrophila's in OK away from the Ozarks are geographically and ecologically closest to Heppner's Petrophila, found from central OK south through central Texas.
2. Heppner's Petrophila, as defined by Blanchard & Knudson (1983) and studied in over a hundred additional images on iNat and BG, is essentially indistinguishable from Feather-edged by wing pattern.
3. It remains to be seen if barcoding can in fact separate any of several of the species in the "fulicalis-species group", which includes fulicalis, canadensis, confusalis, heppneri, hodgesi, and santafealis. This set of species are all extremely closely related and with the exception of Canadian Petrophila, provide a set of geographic replacements across the continent.

 
Going back to Feather-edged
I just completed a manuscript which addresses the identificaiton of this group of moths. These Washington Co., OK, examples are indeed good examples of Feather-edged Petrophila. My supposition that they belonged to Heppner's was erroneous. Heppner's remains a locally occurring Texas endemic. Sorry for all my confusion. I address this ID issue in a more recent journal post on iNaturalist.

There are complexities with the barcode BIN BOLD:AAG9560, that are very confusing. If you look this BIN up, most of its public data records (12 of 14) are proper P. fulicalis from Maryland and Virginia. Your two examples from Washington Co., OK, differ very little from those and the images of the specimens should have been enough to convince me (originally) that yours are also fulicalis. However, somehow, your two specimens got labeled as "Petrophila hodgesi", probably due to the proximity of that regional specialty. Thus your two specimens show up when one searches for the taxon "Petrophila hodgesi". The latter search actually brings up public images of seven specimens, five of which are from Washington Co., AR (not OK), and are part of the type series of true P. hodgesi. But apparently none of those specimens have actually been barcoded or the barcodes were unreadable because none of that set of AR specimens are attached to any BIN. That leaves AAG9560, by default, as the only BIN associated (erroneously) with hodgesi.

So the task at hand is to get some of the real hodgesi from the Ozark and Ouachita ecoregion collected, examined, and barcoded. In my recent review of all this, I turned up about 33 observations of good-looking hodgesi (with some overlap of images on iNat and BG) which encompass 15 county-level occurrences in s.w. MO, w. AR, and e. OK (Sexton, in press). In OK, I show records in Adair, Cherokee, La Flore, Mayes, McCurtain, Pushmataha, and Sequoyah counties in OK, but none in Washington Co. Some of those county records are from Nelson's county chart and I have not seen specimens or images firsthand from all these counties.

I have found legitimate(-looking) fulicalis records in the following OK counties: Mayes, Osage, and Washington. Nelson shows fulicalis records also in Adair and McCurtain counties. Those latter records might be correct but those counties overlap the edge of the Ozark and Ouachita ecoregions, so I need to contact Nelson to verify the records.

Moved

Further research
Further research suggests this moth is a very good example of Petrophila fulicalis as originally described, which is also the name applied to *some* of the members of the BIN BOLD:AAG9560. The application of the name jaliscalis to this BIN is erronous and will be corrected in due time. However, I won't move this image until I get confirmation from other sources.

 
BIN update
J-F Landry just updated Petrophila BINs with the same identifications.

 
Slight Monkey-Wrench...
After reading all the descriptions in Munroe's MONA fascicle and checking habitats and ranges, it appears fairly likely that any of the "fulicalis-like" Petrophila's in the Ozark ecological region of Arkansas, Missouri, and e. Oklahoma are likely to be the regional species Petrophila hodgesi. I'm still working through all these, concentrating primarily on Texas material, so I can't say definitively.

Surprised at P. jaliscalis
In contrast to my remarks on your earlier specimen here, this moth does NOT look like the populations here in Central Texas that I label P. jaliscalis. The yellowish tint of the FW bands, the *lack* of virtually any such color in the AM band on the FW, and the narrow black line over the rear terminal spots on the HW are all contrary to Munroe's 1972 key and description. I don't know what to make of this specimen; it makes me wonder how the BINs in the BOLD project are originally calibrated; which comes first, the BIN or the ID? IF a specimen is originally submitted under a misdetermination (perhaps the earliest ones which were barcoded as "jaliscalis"), does that misdirect all subsequent BIN placements?

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